The extraordinary complex of the Salk Institute is more beautifully and humbly sited and executed than can be conveyed in photographs. Photographs usually express the openness and serenity of the plaza, but not its humanly scaled gesture to the site and Pacific Ocean beyond. The Institute is a geometrized clearing in the landscape, and continually references and expresses the landscape, not itself or its designer. Louis Kahn designed the Salk Center in La Jolla...as an eloquent composition that is spatially and symbolically incomplete, with its two richly rhythmical buildings...[which] define a powerful axis that is open at each end and that constitutes thereby a significant gesture within an American landscape. The composition of this common space...is perceptually, physically, poignantly American as it frames the sea and the land where the old western frontier ends and the new eastern frontier begins. The Institute received the American Institute of Architects Twenty-Five Year Award in 1992. Source: www.galinsky.com/buildings/salk / 'Materials used are concrete, wood, marble and water. Concrete is left with exposed joints and formwork markings. Teak and glass in-fill in the office and common room walls....' Source: www.greatbuildings.com/buildings/Salk_Institute.html